www.dissidentvoice.org
January 26, 2004First Published in
Yellow Times

Israeli
historian Benny Morris crossed a new line of shame when he put his academic
credentials and respectability in the service of outlining the "moral"
justification for a future genocide against Palestinians.

Benny Morris is the Israeli
historian most responsible for the vindication of the Palestinian narrative
of 1948. The lives of about 700,000 people were shattered as they were
driven from their homes by the Jewish militia (and, later, the Israeli army)
between December 1947 and early 1950. Morris went through Israeli archives
and wrote the day by day account of this expulsion, documenting every
"ethnically cleansed" village and every recorded act of violence, and
placing each in the context of the military goals and perceptions of the
cleansers.

Israel's apologists tried
in vain to attack Morris' professional credibility. From the opposite
direction, since he maintained that the expulsion was not "by design," he
was also accused of drawing excessively narrow conclusions from the
documents and of being too naive a reader of dissimulating statements.
Despite these limitations, Morris'
The Birth of the Palestinian Refugees Problem, 1947-1949 is an
authoritative record of the expulsion.

In anticipation of the
publication of the revised edition, Morris was
interviewed in
Ha'aretz. The major new findings in the revised book, based on fresh
documents, further darken the picture.

The new archival material,
Morris reveals, records routine execution of civilians, twenty-four
massacres, including one in Jaffa, and at least twelve cases of rape by
military units, which Morris acknowledges are probably "the tip of the
iceberg." Morris also says he found documents confirming the broader
conclusions favored by his critics: the expulsion was pre-meditated;
concrete expulsion orders were given in writing, some traceable directly to
Ben Gurion.

Morris also found
documentations for Arab High Command calls for evacuating women and children
from certain villages, evidence he oddly claims strengthen the Zionist
propaganda claim that Palestinians left because they were told to leave by
the invading Arab states. Morris had already documented two dozen such cases
in the first edition. It is hard to see how attempts by Arab commanders to
protect civilians from anticipated rape and murder strengthen the Zionist
fairy tale. But that failed attempt at evenhandedness is the least of
Morris' problems. As the interview progresses, it emerges with growing
clarity that, while Morris the historian is a professional and cautious
presenter of facts, Morris the intellectual is a very sick person.

His sickness is of the
mental-political kind. He lives in a world populated not by fellow human
beings, but by racist abstractions and stereotypes. There is an
over-abundance of quasi-poetic images in the interview, as if the mind is
haunted by the task of grasping what ails it: "The Palestinian citizens of
Israel are a time bomb," not fellow citizens. Islam is "a world in which
human lives don't have the same value as in the West." Arabs are
"barbarians" at the gate of the Roman Empire. Palestinian society is "a
serial killer" that ought to be executed, and "a wild animal" that must be
caged.

Morris' disease was
diagnosed over forty years ago, by Frantz Fanon. Based on his experience in
subjugated Africa, Fanon observed that "the colonial world is a Manichean
world. It is not enough for the settler to delimit physically, that is to
say, with the help of the army and the police, the place of the native. As
if to show the totalitarian character of colonial exploitation, the settler
paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil … The native is declared
insensitive to ethics … the enemy of values. … He is a corrosive element,
destroying all that comes near it … the unconscious and irretrievable
instrument of blind forces" (from
The Wretched of the Earth). And further down, "the terms the settler
uses when he mentions the native are zoological terms" (let's not forget to
place Morris' metaphors in the context of so many other Israeli appellations
for Palestinians: Begin's "two-legged beasts", Eitan's "drugged cockroaches"
and Barak's ultra-delicate "salmon"). Morris is a case history in the
psychopathology of colonialism.

Bad
Genocide, Good Genocide

When the settler encounters
natives who refuse to cast down their eyes, his disease advances to the next
stage -- murderous sociopathy.

Morris, who knows the exact
scale of the terror unleashed against Palestinians in 1948, considers it
justified. First he suggests that the terror was justified because the
alternative would have been a genocide of Jews by Palestinians. Raising the
idea of genocide in this context is pure, and cheap, hysteria. Indeed,
Morris moves immediately to a more plausible explanation: the expulsion was
a precondition for creating a Jewish state, i.e. the establishment of a
specific political preference, not self-defense.

This political explanation,
namely that the expulsion was necessary to create the demographic
conditions, a large Jewish majority, favored by the Zionist leadership, is
the consensus of historians. But as affirmative defense, it is
unsatisfactory. So the idea that Jews were in danger of genocide is repeated
later, in a more honest way, as merely another racist, baseless
generalization: "if it can, [Islamic society] will commit genocide."

But Morris sees no evil.
Accusing Ben Gurion of failing to achieve an Arabian Palestine, he
recommends further ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, including those who are
Israeli citizens. Not now, but soon, "within five or ten years," under
"apocalyptic conditions" such as a regional war with unconventional weapons,
a potentially nuclear war, which "is likely to happen within twenty years."
For Morris, and it is difficult to overstate his madness at this point, the
likelihood of a nuclear war within the foreseeable future is not the sorry
end of a road better not taken, but merely a milestone, whose aftermath is
still imaginable, and imaginable within the banal continuity of Zionist
centennial policies: he foresees the exchange of unconventional missiles
between Israel and unidentified regional states as a legitimate excuse for
"finishing the job" of 1948.

Morris speaks explicitly of
another expulsion, but, in groping for a moral apology for the past and the
future expulsion of Palestinians, he presents a more general argument, one
that justifies not only expulsion but also genocide. That statement ought to
be repeated, for here is a crossing of a terrible and shameful line.

Morris, a respectable,
Jewish, Israeli academic, is out in print in the respectable daily, Haaretz,
justifying genocide as a legitimate tool of statecraft. It should be
shocking. Yet anybody who interacts with American and Israeli Zionists knows
that Morris is merely saying for the record what many think and even say
unofficially. Morris, like most of Israel, lives in a temporality apart, an
intellectual Galapagos Islands, a political Jurassic Park, where bizarre
cousins of ideas elsewhere shamed into extinction still roam the mindscape
proudly.

Nor should one think the
slippage between expulsion, "transfer," and genocide without practical
consequences. It is not difficult to imagine a planned expulsion turn into
genocide under the stress of circumstances: The genocides of both European
Jews and Armenians began as an expulsion. The expulsion of Palestinians in
1948 was the product of decades of thinking and imagining "transfer." We
ought to pay attention: with Morris's statement, Zionist thinking crossed
another threshold; what is now discussed has the potential to be actualized,
if "apocalyptic conditions" materialize.

The march
of civilization and the corpses of the uncivilized

It is instructive to look
closer at the manner in which Morris uses racist thinking to justify
genocide. Morris' interview, precisely because of its shamelessness, is a
particularly good introductory text to Zionist thought.

Morris' racism isn't
limited to Arabs. Genocide, according to Morris, is justified as long as it
is done for "the final good." But what kind of good is worth the "forced
extinction" of a whole people? Certainly, not the good of the latter.
(Morris uses the word "Haqkhada," a Hebrew word usually associated with the
extinction of animal species. Someone ought to inform Morris about the fact
that Native Americans aren't extinct.)

According to Morris, the
establishment of a more advanced society justifies genocide: "Yes, even the
great American democracy couldn't come to be without the forced extinction
of Native Americans. There are times the overall, final good justifies
terrible, cruel deeds." Such hopeful comparisons between the future awaiting
Palestinians and the fate of Native Americans are common to Israeli
apologists. One delegation of American students was shocked and disgusted
when it heard this analogy made by a spokesperson at the Israeli embassy in
Washington.

Morris's supremacist view
of "Western Civilization," that civilization values human life more than
Islam, has its basis in the moral acceptance of genocide for the sake of
"progress." Morris establishes the superiority of the West on both the
universal respect for human life and the readiness to exterminate inferior
races. The illogicalness of the cohabitation of a right to commit genocide
together with a higher level of respect for human lives escapes him, and
baffles us, at least until we grasp that the full weight of the concept of
"human" is restricted, in the classic manner of Eurocentric racism, to
dwellers of civilized (i.e. Western) nations.

This is the same logic that
allowed early Zionists to describe Palestine as an empty land, despite the
presence of a million inhabitants. In the end, it comes down to this:
killing Arabs -- one dozen Arabs or one million Arabs, the difference is
merely technical -- is acceptable if it is necessary in order to defend the
political preferences of Jews because Jews belong to the superior West and
Arabs are inferior. We must be thankful to Professor Morris for clarifying
the core logic of Zionism so well.

The color
of Jews

Morris assures us that his
values are those of the civilized West, the values of universal morality,
progress, etc. But then he also claims to hold the primacy of particular
loyalties, a position for which he draws on Albert Camus. But to reconcile
Morris' double loyalty to both Western universalism and to Jewish
particularism, one must forget that these two identities were not always on
the best of terms.

How can one explain Morris'
knowledge that the ethnic Darwinism that was used to justify the murder of
millions of non-whites, including Black African slaves, Native Americans,
Arabs, and others, was also used to justify the attempt to exterminate Jews?
How can Morris endorse the "civilizational" justification of genocide, which
includes the genocide of Jews, even as he claims the holocaust as another
justification for Zionism? Perhaps Morris' disjointed mind doesn't see the
connection. Perhaps he thinks that there are "right" assertions of racist
supremacy and "wrong" assertions of racist supremacy. Or perhaps Morris
displays another facet of the psychopathologies of oppression, the victim's
identification with the oppressor.

Perhaps in Morris' mind,
one half tribalist and one half universalist, the Jews were murdered to make
way for a superior, more purely Aryan, European civilization, and the Jews
who are today serving in the Israeli army, both belong and do not belong to
the same group. They belong when Morris invokes the totems of the tribe to
justify loyalty. But when his attention turns to the universal principle of
"superior civilization," these Jews are effaced, like poor relations one is
ashamed to be associated with, sent back to the limbo they share with the
great non-white mass of the dehumanized. In contrast, the Jews of Israel,
self-identified as European, have turned white, dry-cleaned and bleached by
Zionism, and with their whiteness they claim the privilege that Whites
always had, the privilege to massacre members of "less advanced" races.

False
testimony

It would be marvelous if
Morris the historian could preserve his objective detachment while Morris
the Zionist dances with the demons of Eurocentric racism. But the wall of
professionalism -- and it is a very thick and impressive wall in Morris'
case -- cannot hold against the torrent of hate.

For example, Morris lies
about his understanding of the 2000 Camp David summit. In Ha'aretz,
Morris says that, "when the Palestinians rejected Barak's proposal of July
2000 and Clinton's proposal of December 2000, I understood that they were
not ready to accept a two state solution. They wanted everything. Lydda, and
Akka and Jaffa."

But in his book
Righteous Victims, Morris explains the failure of the negotiations thus:
"the PLO leadership had gradually accepted, or seemed to…Israel...keeping 78
percent of historical Palestine. But the PLO wanted the remaining 22
percent. … At Camp David, Barak had endorsed the establishment of a
Palestinian state…[on only] 84-90 percent of that 22 percent. … Israel was
also to control the territory between a greatly enlarged Jerusalem and
Jericho, effectively cutting the core of the future Palestinian state into
two…" Morris' chapter of "Righteous Victims" that deals with the '90s leaves
a lot to be desired, but it still strives for some detached analysis. In
contrast, in Ha'aretz Morris offers baseless claims he knows to be
false.

If Morris lies about recent
history, and even grossly misrepresents the danger Jews faced in Palestine
in 1948, a period he is an expert on, his treatment of more general
historical matters is all but ridiculous, an astounding mix of insinuations
and clichés. For example, Morris reminds us that "the Arab nation won a big
chunk of the Earth, not because of its intrinsic virtues and skills, but by
conquering and murdering and forcing the conquered to convert." (What is
Morris' point? Is the cleansing of Palestine attributable to Jewish virtues
and skills, rather than to conquering and murdering?)

This is racist slander, not
history. As an example, take Spain, which was conquered in essentially one
battle in 711 A.D. by a small band of North African Berbers who had just
converted to Islam. Spain was completely Islamized and Arabized within two
centuries with very little religious coercion, and certainly no ethnic
cleansing. But after the last Islamic rulers were kicked out of Spain by the
Christian army of Ferdinand and Isabel in 1492, a large section of the very
same Spanish population that willingly adopted Islam centuries earlier
refused to accept Christianity despite a century of persecution by the
Spanish Inquisition. 600,000 Spanish Muslims were eventually expelled in
1608.

Obviously, Islamic
civilization had its share of war and violence. But, as the above example
hints, compared to the West, compared to the religious killing frenzy of
sixteenth century Europe, compared to the serial genocides in Africa and
America, and finally to the flesh-churning wars of the twentieth century,
Islamic civilization looks positively benign. So why all this hatred? Where
is all this fire and brimstone Islamophobia coming from?

Being
elsewhere

From Europe, of course, but
with a twist. Europe has always looked upon the East with condescension. In
periods of tension, that condescension would escalate to fear and hate. But
it was also mixed and tempered with a large dose of fascination and
curiosity. The settler, however, does not have the luxury to be curious. The
settler leaves the metropolis hoping to overcome his own marginal, often
oppressed, status in metropolitan society. He goes to the colony motivated
by the desire to recreate the metropolis with himself at the top.

For the settler, going to
the colony is not a rejection of the metropolis, but a way to claim his due
as a member. Therefore, the settler is always trying to be more metropolitan
than the metropolis. When the people of the metropolis baulk at the
bloodbath the settler wants to usher in the name of their values, the
settler accuses them of "growing soft," and declares himself "the true
metropolis." That is also why there is one crime of which the settler can
never forgive the land he colonized -- its alien climate and geography, its
recalcitrant otherness, the oddness of its inhabitants, in sum, the harsh
truth of its being elsewhere. In the consciousness of the settler,
condescension thus turns into loathing.

Israeli settler society,
especially its European, Ashkenazi part, especially that Israel which calls
itself "the peace camp," "the Zionist Left," etc., is predicated on the
loathing of all things Eastern and Arab. (Now, of course, we have in
addition the religious, post-1967 settlers who relate to the Zionist Left
the way the Zionist Left stands in relation to Europe, i.e. as settlers.)
"Arab" is a term of abuse, one that can be applied to everything and
everyone, including Jews. This loathing is a unifying theme. It connects
Morris' latest interview in Ha'aretz with Ben Gurion's first
impression of Jaffa in 1905; he found it filthy and depressing.

In another article,
published in Tikkun Magazine, Morris blames the "ultra-nationalism,
provincialism, fundamentalism and obscurantism" of Arab Jews in Israel for
the sorry state of the country (although Begin, Shamir, Rabin, Peres,
Netanyahu, Barak, Sharon, and most of Israel's generals, leaders, and
opinion makers of the last two decades are European Jews). For Morris,
everything Eastern is corrupt and every corruption has an Eastern origin.

One shouldn't, therefore,
doubt Morris when he proclaims himself a traditional Left Zionist. There is
hardly anything he says that hasn't been said already by David Ben Gurion or
Moshe Dayan. Loathing of the East and the decision to subdue it by unlimited
force is the essence of Zionism.

Understanding the
psycho-political sources of this loathing leads to some interesting
observations about truisms that recur in Morris' (and much of Israel's)
discourse. Morris blames Arafat for thinking that Israel is a "crusader
state," a foreign element that will eventually be sent back to its port of
departure. This is a common refrain of Israeli propaganda. It is also
probably true. But it isn't Arafat's fault that Morris is a foreigner in the
Middle East. Why shouldn't Arafat believe Israel is a crusader state when
Morris himself says so? "We are the vulnerable extension of Europe in this
place, exactly as the crusaders."

It is Morris -- like the
greater part of Israel's elite -- who insists on being a foreigner, on
loathing the Middle East and dreaming about mist-covered Europe, purified
and deified by distance. If Israel is a crusader state, and therefore a
state with shallow roots, likely to pack up and disappear, it is not the
fault of those who make that observation. It is the fault of those Israelis,
like Morris, who want to have nothing to do with the Middle East.

Morris is deeply
pessimistic about Israel's future; this feeling is very attractive in
Israel. The end of Israel is always felt to be one step away, hiding beneath
every development, from the birthrate of Bedouins to the establishment of
the International Court of Justice.

Naturally, every
Palestinian demand is such a doomsday threat. This sense of existential
precariousness can be traced back to 1948; it was encouraged by Israel's
successive governments because it justified the continuous violence of the
state and the hegemony of the military complex. It may eventually become a
self-fulfilling prophesy.

But this existential fear
goes deeper. It is rooted in the repressed understanding (which Morris both
articulates and tries to displace) of the inherent illegitimacy of the
Israeli political system and identity. "Israel" is brute force. In Morris'
words: "The bottom line is that force is the only thing that will make them
accept us." But brute force is precarious. Time gnaws at it. Fatigue
corrodes it. And the more it is used, the more it destroys the very
acceptance and legitimacy it seeks.

For Israel, the fundamental
question of the future is, therefore, whether Israelis can transcend
colonialism. The prognosis is far from positive. In a related article in The
Guardian, Morris explains that accepting the right of return of the
Palestinian refugees would mean forcing Israeli Jews into exile. But why
would Jews have to leave Israel if Israel becomes a bi-national, democratic
state? One cannot understand this without attention to the colonial loathing
of the Middle East which Morris so eloquently expresses.

But taking that into
account, I'm afraid Morris is right. Many Israeli Jews, especially European
Jews who tend to possess alternative passports, would rather emigrate than
live on equal terms with Palestine's natives in a bi-national state. It is
to Frantz Fanon again that we turn for observing this first. "The settler,
from the moment the colonial context disappears, has no longer an interest
in remaining or in co-existing."

Gabriel Ashwas born in Romania and
grew up in Israel. He is a regular contributor to Yellow Times.org, where
this article first appeared (www.yellowtimes.org).
Gabriel encourages your comments:
gash@YellowTimes.org